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T O P I C R E V I E W

oke

I was wondering if you could help me find one of these commemorative coins: 1 (look at last page) | 2.

It was a commemorative made in '94, and I guess only available to those who knew Wah Chang and received their newsletter. People at Wah Chang and The Great Western Mint (who is connected somehow to the Liberty Mint) do not have any leads as to who might have any extras for sale. Wah Chang is now making new 'First in Flight' commemoratives (which can be purchased from hotmetalshop.com), and I got news that they might make a redesigned Apollo XI coin for the 35th anniversary (for either the end of this year or sometime next year), but I wanted to track down one of the first niobium coins. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

(I got an email that the third "First in Flight" coin isn't about the Apollo XI landing.)

oke

Anybody have any leads to this coin this year?

oke

(A few years later...) So, anyway, I was able to find one of these coins from the person who was directly involved with its creation (he worked at Wah-Chang and with those at Liberty Mint/The Great Western Mint who minted the coin), so that's kind of a fun backstory for it:

Meademan

What is Niobium? Is it special?

oke

quote:Originally posted by Meademan:What is Niobium? Is it special?

Well, according to the article on the last page of this (almost 6 MB .pdf) Outlook newsletter (which has been moved to a new url since I first posted it almost a decade ago, lol), since a niobium alloy was used for some critical parts of the lunar lander (and more about the Nb alloy, C-103, which was used in the rocket engine skirt extensions, is shared in an article from 9 years ago - 2nd page of a ~ 1 MB .pdf this time), tptb chose to create this world's first niobium coin to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Apollo XI mission. So, it's not a flown medallion, or anything special like that, but it's one that might be less common or at least one which has an interesting backstory to it.

oke

Well, that's fun. The links to content online is often dynamic, and the urls to the articles referred to earlier are now defunct. So hopefully this will work, in case folks want to read about the niobium coins.